WE MAY BE UP SHIT CREEK WITHOUT A PADDLE, BUT GEORGE 'DUBYA'S' GONNA WORK SOMETHING OUT TO SAVE US, THERE, NOW DOESN'T THAT MAKE YOU FEEL BETTER ?-

There is a pile of finance companies in the 'good ol' U.S.of.A, which go by names like 'Red neck George Finklesteins'; Auntie delores's amalgamated ; Chuck n' Butch's money factory, mom's apple pie finances, etc, etc, all who seem to be having money troubles. But far from being the names of back water Kentucky shops n' banks out of old Beverley Hillbilly episodes, they're huge American finance corporations and they are having all kinds of money troubles, which ,apparently is screwing up the prices of unsmoked back bacon, Rice Kripies and teabags in Asda over here. So as the world plummets down towards this financial catastrophe of one of old or new testament or even biblical proportions. Banks, building societies, etc close or have to be bailed out by the Bank of England,staff are booted to hell out of it and theres nothing else on Sky News between Eamon Holmes and the weather n' adverts, but financial 'shock horror, breaking, latest financial updates. But its alright, theres nothing to worry about. No! George 'Dubya' Bush is going to work on solving the cash crisis that threatens to engulf us all. He will be aided in this task of averting this financial meltdown by the man who sold all our gold reserves, lost us all our pensions and made it so we can'retire untill we're about 96, the 'boy' wonder, Mr Gordon Brown. There i told you, it'd be ok.

I wonder why the money and finances of the world aren't left to bankers and experts in finance whose aim is to keep the money and wealth flowing, admittedly ,some going their way, but that is a little more understandable than having the finances of the world totally dependant on bastard politicians, party politics,opinion polls , presidential candidates, spin doctors, etc, etc. Imagine going in to hospital for an emergency operation and instead of a surgeon they dragged in a politician, because his party cares and wants to save your life and to show the British public how ,not only is the NHS safe in their hand ,but he can whip your spleen out too. The patient may die, but a goverment spokesman would put a positive spin on it, so all would be well, well not for you, but your dead .

WHOSE THE CLOWNS,THE FELLAHS WITH THE BIG RED NOSES AT ZIPPO'S CIRCUS, OR THE FELLAHS WITH THE BIG ROLL OF RED TAPE AT BIRMINGHAM CITY COUNCIL?

Red tape strikes again!..Clowns at Zippo's circus in the fine city of Birmingham have been banned from playing their trumpets live ,under the clown playing trumpets live act, without a license, of 1602(4.15 p.m, Tuesday afternoon,sometime in March). Enforced by those fine folk in Brum city council, in the Department of stopping strangely dressed entertainers playing instruments live without a license.(The DOSSDEPILWAL). Keep up the good work ,chap n' chapesses, we'd be lost without you. My god ,imagine how the world would be if clowns were allowed to roam free around circus rings blowing unlicensed trumpets to unsuspecting families. If they knew the truth they wouldnt be laughing and enjoying themselves..It'd be the beginning of the end..ARMAGEDDON!!!

Mind you, it's not all bad. This has given me a chance to use a cartoon about trumpets i've had lying around the floor of the studio, 'for a while'. There's no clowns or city councillors, or red tape in it, but there is a trumpet ,or a likeness of a trumpet, so it'll have to do......Oh c'mon do you know what its like to have to draw something for every comment i want to make. Just making life a little easier for myself, but still bringing happiness, joy ,knowledge and wisdom to the world. I can do no more.

NEITHER MAN NOR MARTIAN CAN FIGHT AGAINST RED TAPE

Theres a lot to be said about being a lazy bone idle get, and being a dedicated, proud 'arlarse' of many years standing(on occassions), i've heard most of them. Everybody needs to have a rest from their everyday activities(or lack, thereof), so, when i'm not slobbing about, i relax by forging my body in the white hot furnace of my will, into a steel hard finely honed fighting/killing machine by doing a bit of Karate. A few parents of kids who go to my daughters school asked if i'd run a little basic afterschool class for them. I thought any opportunity to belt a few snotty kids around the 'lug'oles', is an opportunity not to be sneered at, so i said ok, go'ed(an old ancient Liverpool expression of assent). The school seemed happy enough to have me drag myself off the slightly sticky cover of my couch once a week to go down and reveal the secrets of the Orient ,Zen and the art of smashing somebodies face in. Then the fun starts.

To do ANYTHING, now requires filling in of endless forms detailing everything, place, whom, what, where, why for every ten minutes over the last 20 years. For someone who has an uncontrollable hatred of forms and the people who give them to me ;And the people i've got to send them back too. To await their bloody reply/decision, or whatever, so, i dumped it on my Lovely Lynne ,faithful wife n' form filler-upperer. So this 'effin' form was sent to the police criminal records people, or something to see if i was Jack the Ripper or Gary Glitter, or someone. Apparently, i'm not, so i'm in the clear. I was a little dissappointed to see only a few speeding fines mentioned. I was hoping to be on an old 10 most wanted, somewhere in the world. I'm getting on, i s'pose my wild days're behind me,(sigh, it comes to us all!). Well, with all that sorted, i thought,' well off we jolly well go', but no, that would be too simple.

Now, through the years i've been called a liability on many occassions,( often by many ,if not most of you reading this, ya bastards!)....A public liability , and even a private liability, but we'll draw a heavily stained blanket over the private stuff, as it doesn't really concern us now, as i don't need insurance for that. But i've just been told i've got to pay and be accepted for public liability insurance. All this just to do the local school a favour for half an hour a week. I trained for years and got me black belt ,(yeah ,now!ya boo n' sucks to you!), but i've fought many people ,even won a couple, but i concede defeat to bloody red tape.....RED TAPE HAS BEATEN ME!!!!......There is a company ,THROTTLE, STRANGLE and ENTWINE Ltd and they make red tape for all the goverment departments whose sole purpose is to make the simple complicated and everything baffling and befuddling and not worth doing. Theres health n safety ,those must be strange people .Their job is to find danger, everywhere! Then come up with ridiculous ways of earning their wages by illimnating the ,danger, risk, peril.or whatever that nobody noticed in the first place ,then install 'safety features' that nobody wants or likes or uses . Then, there's probably a very creative busy department that designs forms, for everything..AAh we live in wonderful times.Some of the departments in that big old building with the clock in London must have departments that make the Ministry of Funny Walks quite resonable.

In the wonderful Jeff Wayne's 'WAR OF THE WORLDS', who can forget Richard Burton speaking about the 'RED WEED' that spread across the world strangling the life out of the existing vegetation all over the planet Earth. That was why Mars was red. Because of the Red Weed. That 'Rip-off merchant H.G. WELLS' said the same in his 'War of the worlds'. Now its slightly different our blue/green Earth is being strangled by Red Tape. The martians'll be wondering why parts of the Earth is looking Martian red. I s'pose, one good thing will come out of it, tho'. Well, if we can't walk without stumbling over Red Tape ,what chance do the martians have stomping around in those big,huge tri-pods? They'd be antennae over tentacle before you knew it. So they wont be invading yet. Not 'till they get the forms through, anyhow.

THOSE LESS THAN MAGNIFICENT SHOWER OF BASTARDS AND THEIR FLYING MACHINES.

Ahhh, the joys of flight! Zipping around the world, almost effortlessly. You arrive at the airport; Your bags are taken by happy smiling staff and you help yourself to food n' drink , then when your flight arrives you amble along to the departure gate, onto the plane and your seat with happy smiling cabin crew helping you all along. And before you know it , your up, up and away. Then you arrive and all this pleasurable experience is repeated in reverse with a different accent and off we go. As in all fairy tales we go and live happily ever after. Like all fairy stories , its a heap o' shit!

Only days ago we flew from Liverpool to Dublin. We parked the car somewhere in North Wales, walked to the John Lennon international airport. Ryanairs team of experts checked us in and took our bags , stripped us before irradiating us in the xray scanners with a variety of expressions and requests none of which was smiling or friendly. Then when we'd deciphered the totally garbled announcements ,we had to walk , virtually to Manchester airport to get to our gate .The flight eventually got to Dublin airport(or is it Val Donican international airport?)..An hour late, not bad for a journey that only takes 20-30 minutes. When we got there, i think, actually we landed at Shannon, going by the walk we had to get to Dublin arrivals.

The day we were coming home we started walking from Dublin to Shannon to our gate after asking someone what the announcer said, nobody had a clue. I know we live in enlightened times .We actively combat, Sexism, racism,ageism, and a whole variety of 'ism's' too many to mention or even to be aware of. One that should be scratched off the list is ,Accentism. Just get an announcer that can speak good 'proper' 'English ' in British and Irish airports. Somethings got to be wrong when everybody in a major international airport looks up at every announcement and says to their companion or anyone around ."What the F***k did he just say?". As i said we continued our long trek to gate D77.A gate etched forever into my memory. When i go, i want my remains spread or scattered, depending what they do with me, at gate D77, Val Doonican international airport. We stood for an age, or so, just growing older, layers of dust and cobwebs formed over us, children reached maturity, mature adults reached old age and passed away, free from the queuing at last. But the rest of us queued on only to find out that our 1345 plane was cancelled till 20.00 that night. After another walk back, a queue of a few more hours , only to find our 20.00 flight was now at 1.00, in the morning. because of technical problems??? Which we were quietly told was technically there wasn't enough people to fill the plane, so they quite simply cancelled it. Nice of them. Mind you, we did get a meal voucher for £3.50, just enough for a small coffee. then spent an age trying to get our bags back just to hand them in again. Eventually we got a plane 10 hours later, only 20 times the time the journey takes

During the course of our day we went through the x-ray machines countless times. But i did discover that ,as we eventually went to bed, finished our reading, as thats what married folks do when they go to bed.( thats a little priveliged info for you dashing young batchelors and single ladies out there). When the light was turned out, we both glowed in the dark like luminous hands on a watch, i thought the Lovely Lynne looked quite fetching irradiated. Does anyone know where we can get a 2nd hand x-ray scanner or some old Uranium, Plutonium,Cobalt. Just to add a little radiation to our sex life, you know what i mean, nudge, nudge.

DEAD COMPUTERS; DEAD COMPUTER REPAIRMEN ALL GET CONNECTED AT WWW.PEARLYGATES@HEAVEN.COM

Hello there, one n'all. Sorry about the on-line, finger on the pulse ,incisive comment-less couple of weeks, but this was due to a technological 'spanner in the works'. Namely the bloody computer blew up /crashed-out. And eventually after trying to work it all out myself, seeing the amount of cables stuck in the back of our basic PC. Roughly about twice what the Large hadron collider has around its magnets, i looked and thought something along the lines of "£$%&* that!!!" We'll get someone in, but couldnt find the guy we've used before. And wrapped in the cables was the skeletal remains of ,who i suppose to be the brave noble soul who was the last PC repairman we called out the last time the dangblamed thing decided to screw us up.

I imagined as i unwrapped the boney ex repairman from the mass of cables. The dogs were showing great interest, lots of bone, but i dont know if ex PC repairmen have much in the way of marrowbone jelly for a dogs healthy teeth n' coat and all the healthy things dog food advertisers place such importance on. I dont suppose he's too worried, being the dedicated sort like these PC repairmen are. He's sitting on a celestial cloud somewhere still nobly trying to get an internet connection from those fine chaps at AOL(?). It's hard enough to get one down here, it must be murder in paradise. I think he'll have to change his broadband supplier to http://www.pearlygates@heaven.com/.

Technology is truly a wonderful thing, so i'm told. Obviously all this smashing of subatomic particles together to unlock the secrets of the universe is very nice, but that is as nothing to my beloved wife, the Lovely Lynne. To whom sciencs begins and ends with a new dishwasher. So, we get one. Two sweaty fellahs from Curries hump this big box into the middle of the kitchen floor, then smartly piss off. Then follows 2 days deciphering the single page of Enigma code transcript that comprises the instructions on how to fit the bloody thing. We swore solidly for 2 days. I got a mate in, he's a handyman/plumber, he spent the day adding to our growing collection of swearwords for fitting dishwashers too. Eventually a couple of fellahs came out a day or so later and added to our dictionary, but finally we did it, got the damn thing fitted and connected. I don't understand why we need it. I don't mind washing up, sticking some loud music on; Grabbing the Fairy Liquid and off we jolly well go. simple!

Using the bloody machine you have to rinse everything before you put everything in its special place. then when its done you've often got to rinse and wipe the'clean' stuff again. So, why not forget the machine and save time and just wash everything in the sink 3 or 4 times? It may not be a highly puzzling technological question on par with the big bang, but it confuses the hell outta me. The Big Bang, does seem to make some sense to me, unlike women and dishwashers.....Gawd, i need a drink.